Posts Tagged ‘security features’

In part two of the Globe and Mail’s Small Business Editor Katherine Scarrow’s feature interview with Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff, they discuss how printing and protecting money is big business for Fortress Paper.

Mr. Wasilenkoff discusses Fortress Paper being the ‘sole maker’ of the Swiss Franc for thirty years and how Fortress Paper is in the final stages of the next series Swiss Franc that will come out next year and “be the most state of the art and have more counterfeit features than any other banknote in the world”.

To watch Part 2 of Fortress Paper in their three-part video series entitled Talking To Entrepreneurs, please click HERE.

BBC News visited Fortress Paper’s facility in Landquart, Switzerland this week to learn about the process of making banknotes.

In a video featured in the BBC’s Business section, Marco Ziethen, the production manager at Landquart, takes reporter Lucy Burton through a step-by-step guide to manufacturing banknotes. From importing, refining and bleaching cotton, Ziethen showed how cotton gets turned into currency. Ziethen also explained how, as the paper is being made, security features are embedded in order to prevent counterfeiting of whatever currency is being produced.

The Landquart facility produces an astonishing number of banknotes each day, said the BBC.

“Each pallet has 18,000 sheets of paper on it. Each sheet will eventually be cut into 54 notes. That is an impressive 972,000 notes on each pallet. The mill runs 24 hours a day and it takes half an hour to make a pallet. So, overall, the mill can turn out around 46,656,000 notes per day,” Burton wrote. “If they are making 500-euro notes that day, the amount of money passing through these doors is simply mind-boggling.”

Vancouver-based Fortress Paper Ltd., has made significant strides in production since they began running the Swiss mill, going from “producing less than 1,000 tonnes of paper per year to 10,000 tonnes per year,” according to the BBC article.

Getting to this point, however hasn’t been easy. In another video posted on their site, Fortress Paper CEO Chad Wasilenkoff said the business provided some initial challenges.

“The banknote and passport industry is a very closed group of people,” he said. “A lot of the companies that are operating in this space have been operating since the 1500s or 1600s so we’re a fairly new entry into this.”

Getting reference orders and new contracts with national banks can be challenging, said Wasilenkoff, but Fortress has made some impressive in-roads acquiring large contracts with countries such as Switzerland to produce the Swiss franc – considered to be an industry standard in security.

In addition to these contracts, the banknote industry is one that is perpetually in flux. As technologies change, national banks have to keep updating security features on their banknotes to curb counterfeiting.

“Fortress hopes that the Landquart mill can help banks to ‘stay ahead of the curve’ and of course – make some money in the process,” Burton wrote.

On CRN Digital Talk Radio, Erik Hines & Jack Roberts host The Erik & Jack Attack, where they share sixty minutes of exciting discussion, pop culture, politics, news, and anything else that may be on their minds. On Tuesday, February 9th the Boston bred conservative and the left coast liberal talked about Fortress Paper.

From their blog:

Did you know that there’s only one company in the world authorized to produce the Swiss franc banknotes, which are widely considered to be the most secure currency in the world?

Meet Fortress Paper, (TSX: FTP), an international provider of security and other specialty papers, which is the sole manufacturer of the banknote paper for the Swiss franc. They have also produced banknote papers for over 100 currency denominations for over 25 countries and are one of only nine authorized suppliers of banknote paper for the Euro currency.

New security realities in the 21st century have driven the need for ever-improving security features to be included in banknotes, passports, identification cards, checks and certification papers. The proliferation of color copying, scanning and printing technologies require that producers must continue to develop increasingly sophisticated anti-counterfeit solutions.

While governments continue to improve the quality of banknote paper, overall banknote circulation has continued to grow as a result of economic activity in developing countries and the introduction of the Euro in Europe. “Counterfeit money printing activity continues in several global hot-spots,” reports CSO Magazine.

Fortress Paper’s President & CEO, Chad Wasilenkoff, talks to the Business News Network (BNN) about his company’s focus on non-woven wallpaper & security paper, and speaks about upcoming innovations at their Landqart Mill in Switzerland.

With counterfeit banknotes, ID papers, and open-air admission tickets becoming increasingly easier to produce and more frequent due to technological advances in scanning and colour printing, the need for security papers that can’t be copied is on the rise.

In response to this demand, Fortress Paper has developed Irisafe – a security feature that cannot be duplicated by colour copiers or scanners.

Irisafe is an iridescent striped coating that is integrated into security papers and is characterized by brilliant and changing colours when you change the angle of view.

If an Irisafe stripe were present in a $20 bill, for example, the radiant colours on the stripe would change when you moved the bill at various angles – easily visible to anyone, even in less than optimum light conditions.

To further enhance the security feature, more than one stripe can be used on the same security paper.

By placing two or three different coloured iridescent stripes next to each other, the colour change between the different stripes is amplified and intensified to the naked eye when the angle is changed.

A colour copier cannot reproduce either the brilliancy or the change of colour. At best, a photocopied forgery will show spotty stripes instead of the trademarked Irisafe qualities.

On top of all this, various machine-readable invisible tracer substances and pigments can also be integrated into the stripes, further increasing the safety provided by Irisafe.